National Quiz Bowl(2010)

[UPDATE: February, 2016—As I gradually go back over my old travelogues, I‘ll be leaving the original text intact but adding additional comments in boldfaced enclosed in brackets to expand on what was originally said. I‘ll also add some additional photos to enhance the original travelogues. This is another travelogue that is being revised from a .pdf document and as such will have some differences from the original. It’s a little strange writing this revision in the winter of 2016. Today (February 21) as I start on this, I just got back from visiting our former superintendent, Gene Meister, who is in hospice care. Chances are by the time I finish with the revision, he won’t be around anymore. Gene has been battling cancer for the better part of a decade now. Partly as a reprieve from that, he and his wife and grandson came out to Washington to join us on 5the 2010 quiz bowl trip. We reminisced about that when I saw him this afternoon. It’s weird to think the trip was six years ago, but Gene’s grandson Andrew (who had just finished fifth grade at the time) is looking at colleges now. I know I’ll be thinking of Gene a lot as I go through this revision, which may be a bit harder to write than some of the others.] Garrigan has had a long tradition of success in quiz bowl. In fact, we celebrated the school’s fiftieth anniversary last year, and one of the events that was part of the celebration was an alumni tournament that brought back many of those who had been to national tournaments in the past. [Those involved still talk about the alumni quiz bowl. We’ll probably revive it if they do summer activities for our sixtieth anniversary, and it also spawned an annual community quiz bowl tournament that continues to this day.] e kept up that tradition in 2010. My “good” team handily won a tournament in Spirit Lake, and they finished in the top four at every regional tournament they entered. In addition each month they entered a “20 Questions” contest sponsored by the company that runs the National Academic Championships. That online competition [which has since been discontinued] tests research skills as much as knowledge, but either way Garrigan was among the top teams nationally every single month of the school year. We decided clear back in December that we’d be making a return trip to nationals (our eleventh overall). Between the extreme winter weather and a rush of events in the spring, the trip kind of snuck up on me this year. It seemed that before I knew it, it was May. Our seniors were graduating, and the journey to Washington was just around the corner. This ended up being one of the least planned trips we’ve done, but it was a good one—and a very successful one—nonetheless. For the past fifteen years or so, the National Academic Championships have been held each year in three separate locations. While the first and last have varied somewhat over time, the middle one has pretty much always been Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. [They’ve since left Marymount, and now the “D.C.” phase of the tournament is at a hotel northern Virginia.] I’d done this trip before on several occasions, though it would be new and different for the students I was taking this year. I tried to vary things a bit from the past to keep things fresh for me as well. For the most part I enjoyed traveling with the group we had this year. This was a smaller group than we’ve sometimes had, which was nice. Most of the kids were good friends with one another, which avoided a lot of the cliquishness we’ve had some years. I was up at 5:15 this morning, well before my typical rising time in summer. After showering and throwing my stuff in my car, I stopped by McDonalds to catch a quick bite of breakfast. I’ve had a tradition (or perhaps a superstition) of eating “good luck” breakfasts at fast food places fort decades, going back to stopping at Hardees before every speech contest I went to in high school. It’s convenient that our McDonalds now opens ridiculously early (5am), so I was able to get an Egg McMuffin and still make it out to school before 6:00. One of the kids was already there when I arrived, and all the others showed up promptly—a good sign for what was to come. This year we’d be taking two school vehicles on our trip. One, a blue 1994 Chevy Suburban, has been a familiar sight on school trips for some time now. While it’s a high-mileage vehicle, it’s been very well maintained and generally drives quite well. We were also privileged to be the first group to break in the school’s newest vehicle, a used (but nearly new) black 2008 Suburban that was loaded with just about any electronic feature you could imagine. Both the kids and the mothers who were accompanying us on this trip loved that vehicle. I can’t say I did as much. All those electronics just seemed like invitations for things to go wrong. When driving it, everything seemed very soft, too; it seemed to take time to respond whenever you did something. [The black suburban is still the main suburban used for school events at Garrigan, and I still don’t care much for it. I most recently drove it to district speech contest, and it still felt soft and unresponsive. What’s more the digital readout kept flashing silly warnings (like “ROAD MAY BE ICY”—duh, it was February— in the place where the odometer should be found.] For most of the trip the women (two mothers of team members who served as chaperones) drove the new vehicle, while our science teacher (the other male chaperon) and I mostly drove the old one. Just about everyone was happy with that arrangement. We were scheduled to leave at 6:30am, and we were off shortly before that time. We headed eastward to avoid a major construction project between Humboldt and Fort Dodge. We encountered a bit of road work on Avenue of the Saints, but nothing that slowed us down in any meaningful way. Before long we made our first stop, at the Kwik Star convenience store in Janesville. The next leg of our trip took us down to Iowa City and then on to the Quad Cities. They’re repairing the I-80 bridge between Bettendorf and Moline, so we had to take I-280 instead. The two routes are pretty much equidistant, though there’s minimally more traffic on 280, because it goes past the airport and slightly closer to the downtown areas. [Generally 280 is my preferred route around the Quad Cities. It’s prettier in Iowa, and it’s more interesting in Illinois.] At Moline we exited onto I-74 and then almost immediately exited again onto John Deere Road. Our captain is a farm boy whose family Loading up the suburbans exclusively uses those green-colored trac- tors, and he was pleased at our choice of stops. We pulled into a Wendy’s in Moline for our lunch break. To save a bit of time, I gassed up the vehicles while the kids were eating. There was a convenience store not far from Wendy’s, though it turned out to be more than a bit of a chore to get there. Gas was $2.799, which turned out to be the most we’d pay on the whole trip. That was still a bargain compared to a couple years ago, when we went to Chicago for nationals and paid over four buck a gallon. [It’s weird to think that when I began this revision gas had plunged to just $1.399. It’s rapidly gone back up, but now in March it’s still 90¢ less than what we paid on this trip. It also should be noted that gas is now normally cheaper in Illinois than it is in Iowa. That’s because a year ago Iowa raised its gas tax by ten cents a gallon.] Most of the kids had gotten enormous lunches [which I’ve learned is typical of teenagers], so even though it took a while to buy gas for two different vehicles, they were still eating when I got back to Wendy’s. I had chili and a frosty, and I finished eating my lunch before some of them were done with their meals. I’d expected we might encounter lots of construction on this trip. A lot of the government stimulus funds were designated to road work, and the states we’d be going through on this trip both have good connections in Washington and also have no problem accepting federal funds. Indeed we did see a lot of highway projects. Throughout Illinois long sections of I-74 were coned off, allowing just one lane of traffic to pass in each direction. They didn’t really seem to be doing much of anything, but there sure used lots of cones! Fortunately traffic moved right along. We stopped briefly at a gorgeously landscaped rest area in Farmer City, Illinois. One of the mothers called home from there and found out it was raining heavily in Algona and there were tornado warnings all over the area. [Her husband was our county sheriff, so she always had detailed information on the weather.] Our weather had been pleasant all day long—perhaps a bit on the hot side, but partly cloudy with just a little bit of wind.

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